THE sky's the limit for a daredevil Newton firefighter who saw his dream come true when he embarked on a charity parachute jump.

But the raffle prize of a tandem parachute jump didn't originally belong to Mark Winstanley - he won the challenge by default after his stepdaughter, Karen, passed on the prize.

She won the jump last November in a charity raffle organised by St Helens firefighters to raise money for their colleagues across the Atlantic in New York, following the September 11 tragedy.

And Mark, from Rainhill, didn't need asking twice. He couldn't wait to take up the challenge and wasn't even a touch nervous as he prepared for the jump.

He said: "I wasn't at all nervous, the only thing that felt a bit weird was just before I jumped and the instructor who I was doing the tandem jump with told me to just let go and lift my feet off the ground, that felt pretty unnatural, but as for the rest of it, it was just the best feeling in the world.

"There aren't really any words to describe the sensation of when you're freefalling from so far up, it's just amazing, I would do it again without the slightest bit of hesitation, but it's a pretty expensive hobby."

Mark collected sponsors for his jump and managed to raise more than £300 for the firefighters' benevolent fund, on top of the original cash raised from the raffle which was donated to firefighters in New York.